TeacherAide
A weekly teaching aide for student developers

Beneath The Surface 

SESSION 11

HANDS ON

This activity demonstrates that it’s easier to serve others when you have walked in their shoes. Form lines with the same number of people.  Have the 1st person from each team run to the other side of the room and take their shoes off and run back to the end of the line. The next person in line runs to the first person's pair of shoes takes theirs off and wears the other persons back to the end of the line.  This continues until the first person is at the front of the line again still without shoes.  They have to run to the last person's shoes and wear them back.

ILLUSTRATING THE POINT

     Franklin Roosevelt’s closest adviser during much of his presidency was a man named Harry Hopkins. During World War II, when his influence with Roosevelt was at its peak, Hopkins held no official Cabinet position. Moreover, Hopkins’s closeness to Roosevelt caused many to regard him as a shadowy, sinister figure. As a result he was a major political liability to the President.

A political foe once asked Roosevelt, “Why do you keep Hopkins so close to you? You surely realize that people distrust him and resent his influence.” Roosevelt replied, “Someday you may well be sitting here where I am now as President of the United States. And when you are, you’ll be looking at that door over there and knowing that practically everybody who walks through it wants something out of you. You’ll learn what a lonely job this is, and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins, who asks for nothing except to serve you.” Winston Churchill rated Hopkins as one of the half-dozen most powerful men in the world in the early 1940s. And the sole source of Hopkins’s power was his willingness to serve.

 

I THOUGHT I HEARD YOU SAY

 

 

 

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

Gandhi

 

 

 

"To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity."

 

Donald A. Adams

 

 

 

 

"Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace; a soul generated by love."

Martin Luther King, Jr

 

 

 

 

"There is no more noble occupation in the world than to assist another human being — to help someone succeed."

Alan Loy McGinnis